Why Iran hawks — and Trump — hate the Iran nuclear deal

President
Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly, September 19,
2017.Associated Press/Evan
Vucci

John Glaser and Emma Ashford respond to Trump’s latest attack on the
nuclear deal:

Iran is clearly abiding by the deal’s requirements, as
President Trump himself has twice formally acknowledged. But
the President appears determined to ignore U.S. allies, his own
intelligence community and the International Atomic Energy
Agency, which has affirmed eight separate times in detailed
reports that Iran is in compliance with the deal.

This desire to withdraw from the JCPOA is difficult to explain.
Whatever his reasoning, this much is clear: All of America’s
options outside the JCPOA carry unacceptably high risks and
threaten to exacerbate the very behavior Iran hawks hope to
forestall.

If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is judged on
its merits and on what it actually does, I agree with them that
wanting to renege on it makes no sense. Iran hawks don’t judge it
that way. They have always judged the JCPOA against an absurdly
high standard (Iran’s complete abandonment of its nuclear program
and sharply curtailing Iran’s foreign policy) that no deal could
ever meet, and so declared it to be unacceptable.

When the fanatics say “no deal is better than a bad deal,” this
is what they mean.

People
gather around a model of Simorgh satellite-carrier rocket
displayed during a ceremony marking the 37th anniversary of the
Islamic Revolution, in Tehran, February 11,
2016.Reuters/Raheb
Homavandi

They regard any compromise with the Iranian government as
inherently discrediting, and so they denounce anything that
doesn’t result in Iran’s total capitulation as “appeasement.”
This is the only way one can understand Trump’s deluded
description of the JCPOA as “one of the worst and most one-sided”
agreements that the U.S. has ever made. It can only seem that way
to those that want the other side to give up everything in
exchange for nothing.

The JCPOA certainly is one-sided, but it is entirely in favor of
the U.S. and the rest of the P5+1: Iran has agreed to restrict
its nuclear program significantly for at least a decade and a
half far more than it is required to by the NPT, and in exchange
it will cease to be punished severely by other states only on
this one issue.

The nuclear deal is one of the most unambiguous “wins” for U.S.
diplomacy in the last twenty years, so it is more than a little
amusing that a president so obsessing with winning regards it as
a huge loss.

President
Donald Trump with US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley at UN
headquarters in New York, September 18, 2017.Thomson Reuters

The simple explanation is that he has no idea what he’s talking
about, but the better explanation is that he is simply echoing
the hard-line rhetoric of Iran hawks.

Glaser and Ashford pick up on a weird line in Trump’s speech that shows how fixated he and
other Iran hawks are on getting rid of Iran’s entire nuclear
program:

We cannot let a murderous regime continue these destabilizing
activities while building dangerous missiles, and we cannot
abide by an agreement if it provides cover for the
eventual construction of a nuclear program [bold
mine-DL].

This betrays the false main assumption that many Iran hawks hold.
Iran’s nuclear program was never going to go away. The deal
doesn’t “provide cover” for the program’s eventual
construction. It restricts a program that already existed so
that it is not used to develop nuclear weapons.

It may seem like a small distinction, but it is a crucial one. It
confirms that the problem Trump and other Iran hawks have with
the deal is that it hasn’t achieved the impossible.

Abolishing Iran’s entire nuclear program was never in the cards.
Complaining that the JCPOA hasn’t done something no agreement
could ever do is absurd, but this seems to be why Trump and other
hard-liners are so eager to scrap a successful non-proliferation
agreement.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.